Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup's Brain Trust

[demmiblue]

Source: Rolling Stone

The Claremont Institute, once a little-known think tank often confused with the liberal-arts college of the same name, has emerged as a driving force in the conservative movement’s crusade to use bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election to rewrite voting laws and remake the election system in time for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. Most infamously, one of the group’s legal scholars crafted memos outlining a plan for how then-Vice President Mike Pence could potentially overturn the last election.

Conservative mega-donors like what they see.

The biggest right-wing megadonors in America made major contributions to Claremont in 2020 and 2021, according to foundation financial records obtained by Rolling Stone. The high-profile donors include several of the most influential families who fund conservative politics and policy: the DeVoses of West Michigan, the Bradleys of Milwaukee, and the Scaifes of Pittsburgh.

The Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation donated $240,000 to Claremont in 2020 and approved another $400,000 to be paid out in the future, tax records show. The Bradley Foundation donated $100,000 to Claremont in 2020 and another $100,000 in 2021, according to tax records and a spokeswoman for the group. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of several charities tied to the late right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, supplied another $450,000 to Claremont in 2020, according to its latest tax filings.


Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/devos-bradley-claremont-trump-election-fraud-insurrection-1274253/

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Link to tweet

[mopinko]

1. insurrections dont come cheap.

tear these frauds apart.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Seditionists

belong in jail

[SWBTATTReg]

3. RICO all of these people out.

[erronis]

4. These people obviously have way too much money, too few scruples, and hatred for democracy.

For people like them that are swimming in billions of wealth, hundreds of millions in income (much tax free); then a few million here or there is like handing out pocket change to the street urchins.

The wealth disparity does feed a lot of this. And it won't be voluntarily fixed.

[Ford_Prefect]

5. You can bet the money paid to Claremont Inst. is a fraction of what the same people spent on the

insurrection and the movement to ban voting seen in so many GOP state legislatures.

There is a an entire network of shell companies built by these people and their co-conspirators moving millions around to push the Christian Nationalist Agenda.

One more set of reasons why we should eat the rich rather than prostrate ourselves before them.

[gab13by13]

8. Exactly

[Midnight Writer]

6. Yet Betsy DeVos reportedly resigned over Jan 6.

With all the shells, foundations and trusts I wonder if the billionaires even know where their money is going or what it is being used for.

[gab13by13]

9. Oh they know.

Then we have the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, the Koch brother's ALEC. The fascists don't need contributions from the unwashed they have billions of dollars to fund the upcoming dictatorship. Just having an oligarchy wasn't good enough for them.

[dalton99a]

7. Kick

[yaesu]

10. This to the greatest thread, nt

[OneCrazyDiamond]

11. Strip them of their assets, citizenship and exile them.

Bye.

[tenderfoot]

12. They're also responsible for raising prices, anti-vax protests, BLM/chain store lootings...

and most the other fuckery that's been happening.

[2naSalit]

13. I say...

RICO (rico)

RICO (rico)

RICO, RICO today.

All the wealthy traitors to you we say,

RICO, RICO today!

[DBoon]

14. The Claremont Institute is boldly pro-Fascist

Some of the people affiliated with Claremont—like Eastman and much of the CRB crowd—are tenured academics with long careers in the classroom. Others—especially those who form the chorus in the American Mind—are controversialists habituated to today’s right-wing modes of arguing and trolling. People from both categories have spent the past five years giving intellectual succor to Donald Trump. Many of the people associated with Claremont, including several of its most prominent figures, have gone all in for MAGA—some even embracing its most authoritarian, paranoid, and racist strands.

The Claremont Institute used to be one of the principal places for conservative intellectuals to come together. It was founded by scholars who were taken seriously even by people who disagreed with them, and some such scholars still publish in the pages of the CRB. That Claremont has been unparalleled in its intellectual submission to Trumpism should give us pause. After all, in some respects the Claremont crowd is precisely the sort who should have known better: deeply read in political philosophy and history, and familiar with the many warning signs that Trump would be a damaging and divisive president. There is also a sense, however, in which the Claremont crowd’s submission to Trump was the most predictable thing in the world—the simple culmination of a political theory rooted in jingoism and denial.

and describing a specific essay published by Claremont called "Conservatism is Not Enough"

Ellmers’s essay—topped by a stock-art photo of a boxer wrapping his hands for a fight—begins by characterizing his enemy, which, it turns out, consists of the majority of the country: “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” The people he has in mind are the ones who voted for Joe Biden (“the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism”). The real and “authentic” Americans are, “by and large,” the 74 million people who voted for Trump—“the vast numbers of heartland voters who still call themselves Americans.” For Ellmers, there is only “the one, authentic America”; the rest of the people in this country “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.” He goes on: “It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

...

Second, Ellmers’s essay is a bold-faced call to anti-republican, anti-democratic, factional arms and action. More than any kind of legitimate appeal to republican or democratic norms of persuasion, it signals an acknowledgment of defeat. As John Ganz writes in a thoughtful commentary on the essay, “its themes of pervading national corruption and decadence, and the need for a counter-revolution and a national rebirth put this text firmly in the radical reactionary or fascist ballpark.”

In this regard, consider the archetypal features of fascism that Sarah Churchwell summarized in an essay last summer, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here”:

Nostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain “bloodlines” over others. Fascism weaponizes identity, validating the Herrenvolk and invalidating all the other folk.

There is nothing definitive about lists like these, and Churchwell’s includes some things that are, to varying degrees, present in every society. But Ellmers’s essay reads like a bingo card for the worst of it.

https://www.thebulwark.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-the-claremont-institute/

The Claremont Institute is more than just a gathering of right wing billionaires - it is the intellectual justification for a violent nationalist autocracy

[rurallib]

15. Slightly off the trail, but here is a great argument for high taxes on the rich

and high taxes on inheritance.

That idle money just sitting around always seems to get into trouble.

[C Moon]

16. They must have given lots of money to tfg and putin, and they have to invest more now.

[Brainfodder]

17. That's all?